08 sep Cabardès: Henri de Lorgeril on the Future of a Unique Appellation
Ten years in tech taught Henri de Lorgeril to move fast. Coming home to a 400-year-old estate taught him to slow down, without losing his edge.
Château de Pennautier has belonged to the Lorgeril family since 1620. For more than four centuries, responsibility for it has passed from one generation to the next, not as an inheritance to be claimed, but as a decision each successor has had to make for themselves. Henri de Lorgeril made his after spending more than ten years building companies in tech and start-ups, far from the vineyards of the Languedoc. “I think the important thing was that it had to be a choice, not an obligation,” he explains. His parents never pushed their children toward the family business. The years outside it, he says, gave him “the freedom to come back with experience of my own, and above all, because I genuinely wanted to.”
That freedom came with a different kind of weight once he arrived. “In tech, you are encouraged to move fast, test, adapt and sometimes change direction completely,” Henri reflects. “In a 400-year-old family estate, some decisions will have consequences for decades. A vineyard planted today may still be producing when my children are my age.” Tradition, he is careful to add, should never become an excuse for standing still. Markets, climate and consumers all move quickly, and the estate has to move with them, welcoming visitors, running its restaurant and sharing its history, all while making the wine that anchors everything else.
Clarifying, not reinventing
Henri frames his arrival as an evolution rather than a break. His parents, Nicolas and Miren de Lorgeril, spent close to forty years building Maison Lorgeril into six estates spread across some of the Languedoc and Roussillon’s finest terroirs. “I would call it a clarification rather than a revolution,” he says. “My role is not to reinvent that. It is to make our identity even clearer.” For Henri, that clarity centres on altitude, freshness and elegance, the qualities that set the house’s cooler, higher-elevation sites apart, alongside giving each wine in the range a more precise role depending on the market and distribution channel. He also brings something of his old career with him: “a slightly more direct approach: fewer complicated messages, clearer priorities and a stronger focus on execution.”
What he is not interested in is imposing a single style across the group. “Maison Lorgeril is our signature and sets the standard, but the estate must keep its own voice,” he says. A wine from Cabardès should not taste like one from La Livinière, Faugères or the Roussillon, and estates like Château de Ciffre and Domaine de la Borie Blanche each keep their own soils, climate and personality. “Our job is not to impose a Lorgeril recipe on them. It is to reveal what is best in each place.” Ask him where he wants that reputation to sit in ten years, and the answer is specific: Maison Lorgeril as the name people associate, immediately, with the Haut-Languedoc’s altitude, freshness and finest terroirs.
Organic as a way of working, not a slogan
Nicolas and Miren began converting the estates to organic farming gradually, one at a time, respecting each vineyard’s own conditions and rhythm. According to Henri, 150 hectares are now farmed organically, and the estates are also HVE (Haute Valeur Environnementale) certified, with regenerative practices, cover crops and soil biodiversity increasingly built into the day-to-day work. The hardest tests, he says, are not the easy vintages. “Organic farming is relatively easy to defend philosophically when conditions are perfect. It becomes much more demanding when disease pressure is high and you have very small windows in which to intervene.” Even in those years, he insists, the direction was never in question. “Organic farming is a means, not a wine style,” he says, pushing back gently on the idea that certification itself is a flavour. What it gives the wine instead is the conditions to express itself, living soils, balanced vines, a closer understanding of each parcel, so that the meeting of Atlantic and Mediterranean influences that defines Cabardès comes through as clearly as possible. The biggest misconception, in his view, is that organic farming is mostly about what a grower stops doing. “In reality, it is much more about how closely you work with the vineyard,” he says, pointing to constant observation and precise timing rather than simply the absence of chemical intervention.
Consumption, not climate, as the bigger disruption
Asked to bet on the greatest disruption facing European winemaking over the next twenty years, Henri doesn’t reach for climate first, even though he calls it “the greatest agricultural challenge.” His answer is consumption habits. “Europe knows how to grow vines,” he argues. “We will adapt our vineyards, varieties and farming practices, even if that will sometimes be difficult.” The harder problem is a generation drinking less overall, without automatically giving wine the place their parents did. “We therefore have to give them a reason to choose wine,” he says. A technically correct bottle is no longer enough; what is needed is identity, authenticity and an industry willing to make wine less intimidating without losing its depth. On the ground, climate is already shaping decisions at Pennautier, just not in the way headlines might suggest. Cabardès’s exposure to both Atlantic and Mediterranean influences, and its many cooler, elevated vineyard sites, give the estate a head start that Henri’s parents built into the project decades before climate change became a major topic. The response now runs through parcel selection, soil health, ground cover, rootstocks and water retention, more than a wholesale swap of grape varieties. “I don’t believe the answer is simply to replace everything,” he says. “Adaptation has to begin with understanding the vineyard.” He is equally wary of planting for a trend. Younger drinkers, less interested in rules and prestige for their own sake, want to understand where a wine comes from and why it tastes different, and they favour freshness and drinkability. Henri’s response is to lean further into identity rather than chase them directly, including revisiting traditional Languedoc and Roussillon white varieties like Macabeu.
Nicolas et Henri de Lorgeril (Crédit photo Yann Audic)
A small gem
On the appellation itself, Henri is unambiguous: the rule that forces Cabardès reds to blend Atlantic grape varieties (Cabernet, Merlot, Malbec) with Mediterranean ones (Grenache, Syrah) is “one of our greatest strengths.” It shows up in the wine, and in the climate, soils, exposures and winds around it, even in the geography nearby: the Seuil de Naurouze, the point where Atlantic-bound and Mediterranean-bound waters divide. “It is what makes Cabardès different, and we should protect it,” he says, while allowing enough flexibility to express the appellation in a modern way. For a family that has lived at Pennautier for more than four centuries, the connection runs deeper than strategy: “Cabardès is where our story started.” He resists the instinct to compare Cabardès to bigger neighbours. “I don’t think Cabardès needs to become another Minervois or Corbières,” Henri says. “It is a small appellation, and that is part of its charm.” His priority is quality and the right ambassadors, sommeliers, wine merchants, restaurateurs and importers who understand the appellation and want to talk about it, alongside wine tourism at the château itself, where visitors can walk the vineyards, taste the wines and eat at the estate’s bistronomic restaurant before they ever discuss the AOC rules. The issue, as he sees it, isn’t perception. “The main issue is awareness,” he says. “Cabardès is still far too little known, even though it has a very distinctive identity and a real story to tell.”
Closer to home
That awareness gap extends to the Netherlands, a market Henri singles out as a good fit for the appellation. “Dutch wine consumers are curious, internationally minded and generally quite open to regions that are not the obvious classics,” he says. What Cabardès needs there isn’t a different appellation, but more visibility: more tastings, more recommendations, more bottles seen in the right places. De Monnik, the estate’s Dutch partner, already carries wines like Château Lorgeril Terroirs d’Altitude Cabardès as an ambassador for the appellation. The next step, in Henri’s words, is turning that presence into recognition, “one glass, one restaurant and one wine merchant at a time.” Cabardès, he adds, will not become known overnight. It will grow the way it always has: through repetition, word of mouth and the right ambassadors.
This article was created in collaboration with De Monnik Dranken, importer of Lorgeril in The Netherlands.
Geen reactie's